The Sunday News
Micheal Mhlanga
The media’s impact on identity consciousness and complexities in our society is worth re-reading this month. February 2018 spurs with a catastrophic threat on “Black media” peril in South Africa where not only press freedom is attempted to be stifled, but “Black thought” media (ANN7) sees itself being subjected to a miniature of race-affirmative action on a satellite service provider whose clientele is proportionally a huge number of Blacks.
The ongoing debate on Africa News Network and Multichoice in South Africa invokes a myriad of themes on the position of Black press freedom, Black freedom of opinion, monopoly of narratives, the position of black owned enterprises on the news market and the quest to construct and set agendas in Africa. The situation begs the questions of who controls the African narrative?
Media Definitions and re-organisation of blackness
Washington DC- Media holds significant influence in our daily lives and it infiltrates our perceptions and understanding with continuous messages that impact our belief and value systems. Since the early utilisation of media, the impacts on how people are represented are imperative to understand how racism is perpetuated within our society. The media provides a greater understanding of historical context as well as patterns, influences and beliefs around generational media impacts. President Clinton’s Race Advisory Board concluded that “racial inequality is so deeply ingrained in American society that they are nearly invisible and White Americans are unaware of the advantages that they enjoy in the society and how their attitudes and actions unintentionally discriminate against persons of colour”
Hollywood – In very early films, such as Birth of a Nation from 1915 (which was originally called The Clansman) and the Tarzan series from 1932, African Americans were represented in the films as savage, ignorant, thieves, interlopers and potential rapists. Even early film distortions, such as African Americans being played by White people who painted themselves to look Black, sent strong symbolic messages. These symbolic messages conveyed that Black people were not “good enough” to represent themselves, and were seen as lacking talent to fill a character role that only Whites could make up for. White people taking over these roles sent a subconscious message to public viewers that the White race was the “chosen,” and the only “proficient” group to participate in mainstream media. These actions and messages were problematic in terms of influencing institutional racism.
Moreover, the savage depiction of Blacks was problematic because these films were successful and often provided a segregated society the only glimpse into Black life available to White Americans.
Harare (Salisbury)-We also see this in colonial Rhodesia where, the print media was small and under South African or British ownership. Like most other institutions, the media catered primarily for the needs of the ruling white minority. Sometimes a newspaper or magazine was published specifically for the African readers, but these were liable to be banned if they were perceived to be “dangerous” to the white regimes’ political dominance. In the period of 1960-1979, the press was subjected to undisguised repression. The African Daily News, Catholic magazine Moto, and Zimbabwe Observer were banned outright for supporting African majority rule. Even the so called “white press” came under direct government censorship. The Rhodesian Herald dramatised its protest by printing the paper with blank spaces to show areas crossed out by the censor’s red ink.
Radio and television always remained under state monopoly, which was fully utilised in the political propaganda war against African freedom fighters, glorifying the bombing of refugee camps in Mozambique and Zambia. The few Black journalists like Chalton Ceza Ngcebetsha and Wirai (Willie) Dzawanda Musarurwa are evident of the repression of Black narratives during the colonial era.
Media and the perversion of the African
The media played a crucial role in disinheriting the African imagination. During the colonial era, when the media finally decided to pay attention to Africans, this was done in a derogatory fashion. Reports on inter-ethnic clashes were highlighted as “conflict between savages” and “mockery was made of every African custom, lifestyle or tradition. One revered thought cadre, Mutwa (1998) observed that a perusal of “printed newspapers printed in Africa (which are not under African control)” makes the “reader…conscious of something which has been going on for centuries. Hardly a month goes by without some White readers writing letters to the editors in which they blatantly insult the African.”.
When Africans sought to resist the Europeans’ insulting behaviour towards Africans by “writing letters to these newspapers protesting against these unscientific insults, our letters are either coldly ignored, or, if published, they are shortened to pointlessness” (Mutwa 1998: 538-539). This further explains the justification of late Steve Biko’s “Frank Talk” ghost-writing in apartheid Azania. The writer’s easy way to perish was in writing the truth. Even after Africans achieved independence, the vilification of African culture and the valorisation of Western values by the media did not abate. On this score, when analysing political conflicts in Africa, the Western media identifies them as a “tribal problem” and that “the news blames those who suffer and locates the source of Africa’s difficulties within African culture, often ignoring the roles of others, especially foreign actors”.
A major problem with this form of thinking is that identifying tribalism as a problem emphasises the negative aspects of cultural pride, representing it as the most important social pathology in Africa whilst concealing the benefits of tribe. The consequence of this approach on the part of the Western media, is that these portrayals often define African culture as the problem and western institutions as the solution.
Focusing on tribalism as the problem, tends to mute other conflicts of interest between groups, and serves as a distraction from covert causes of many African conflicts. Thus, class conflicts become tribalism; regional conflicts become tribalism; responses to structural adjustment programmes become tribalism.
This concern is echoed by Wa Thiong’o in 2008 when he notes that the study of African realities has for too long been seen in terms of tribes. The literature aficionado argues that whatever happens in Kenya, Uganda, Malawi is because of Tribe A versus Tribe B. Wa Thiong’o further notes that this misleading stock interpretation of the African realities has been popularised by the western media which likes to deflect people from seeing that imperialism is still the root cause of many problems in Africa. He laments that “some African intellectuals have fallen victims – a few incurably so – to that scheme”.
The media and Africa’s on-going quest for a true humanity
The idea is borrowed from the late Black Consciousness proponent, Bantu Steve Biko’s title, Black Consciousness and the Quest for a true humanity, anthologised in his book, I Write What I Like. In his anticipation of victory for the struggle against colonialism, Biko (2004: 51) believed that the “special contribution” that Africa would make to international politics or world affairs would be giving the world “a human face”. This he considered more important than creating a military and industrial outlook – an achievement the Western world prides itself in. Biko’s (2004: 26) vision for a humane world drew its inspiration from African culture. While he believed in the potency of African culture to usher in a humane world, Biko (2004: 31) was painfully aware that African culture had been disfigured by the colonialist Europeans. He observed that “in an effort to destroy completely the structures that had been built up in the African Society and to impose their imperialism with an unnerving totality, the colonialists were not satisfied merely with holding a people in their grip and emptying the Native’s brain of all form and content”. The colonialists, Biko further observed, turned to the past of the oppressed and “distorted, disfigured and destroyed it”.
In their renaming and misnaming game, Africa became the “dark continent”, African culture became “barbarism” and African religious practices and customs became “superstition”. The misnaming and renaming project by European colonialists is referred to by one colleague of mine, Richard Mahomva over a Kango plate of corn and nuts as “disinherited imagination”. In his submission, inherited imagination refers to the perception of “standards as good because they are established by the white man and his traditions”, he argues. Disinherited imagination is the stripping, as Mahomva further points out, of the indigenous world of its own myths, poetry, dreams and reveries. As a consequence of the “disinherited imagination”, Africans, to a great extent, lost touch with a culture that celebrated respect for all that exists.
As symbols of political sovereignty and instruments of national cohesion, newspapers, radio, and TV have become purveyors of education and development. However, original and multifarious the media may be, it is clear today that the actions of different African media is a long way from achieving the hoped-for results.
